I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does

People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.

The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.